A web version of the grid, from UC San Diego
I (Ben) met Ismael Villegas Molina at ACE 2026 in Melbourne in February, where we presented the LLMs Unplugged paper. He’s a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering at UC San Diego, and is now teaching an AI literacy course for non-computing majors. For that course he’s built Build Your Own Language Model, a web app that walks through the same steps as My First Language Model. He describes it as
a little web app I made with heavy influence to what you have over at LLMs Unplugged!
Starting from a preset text (Green Eggs and Ham by default) or one you paste in, you step through it a word pair at a time. At each step the app highlights the current word in blue and the word after it in green, then adds a tally to the grid. Once the grid is full, you choose a start word and roll for the next one, the app showing you the weighted die behind each roll.
Our own training widget does the same job, so here it is on Ismael’s default text. Press play to watch the grid fill up one word pair at a time.
Then roll for a sentence:
Ismael’s app works best alongside the paper version. Tallying by hand is the point of the activity, but once students have built a grid themselves, the app lets them run several training texts in a few minutes and compare the results. Ismael has also added unigram and n-gram pages, where students can change how many preceding words the model looks at. The more context module makes the same comparison on paper, with bigram and trigram booklets of the same book.
Ismael is bringing the paper activity into the course itself:
I’m also asking my TA to use the LLMs Unplugged as a discussion section for our students, I think it’s going to be a hit!
I’m keen to hear how the two versions work together. Thanks, Ismael, for building the app and letting us share it. If you’ve adapted the materials for your own classes, we’d love to hear about it, so please get in touch.